Frankie M. Freeman. St. Louis Person of the Year, 2015

An inspiration for all seasons

4 min read

Posted on 12.29.15

4 min read

Posted on 12.29.15

Filed under

Frankie Muse Freeman

Person of the Year

US Civil Rights Commission

Globe-Democrat

Lyndon B Johnson

Starsky Wilson

The annual St. Louis Person of the Year poll on
MayorSlay.com roughly tracks Time
Magazine’s formulation that the honor go the person who ‘for better or for
worse … has done the most to influence the events of the year.”

All for better, this year’s hands-down winner – legendary
St. Louis Lawyer and Civil Rights Pioneer Frankie Muse Freeman – sets at least
two precedents for a Person of the Year.

The honor comes less than a year before Ms. Freeman's 100th
birthday. The out-sized influence she has on this community arises in part out
of advice she offered to the nation nearly 50 years ago.

We visited with Ms. Freemen the week before Christmas in her
sunny, spacious Central West End high rise apartment. She was on the move, preparing
to head out of town to visit family.

We prevailed on her to sit down with us for just a few
minutes. We had made the appointment with one question in mind.

The Person of the Year field she outpaced was heavily
weighted with leading figures in the current wave of community activism,
including the Rev. Starsky Wilson and the ArchCity Defenders. We were
interested in the thoughts of Frankie Freeman, post-Ferguson.

What’s important for us to know about Ferguson, and the
events that have followed?

She answered without hesitation. “All that I have to say
about Ferguson, I wrote in a separate statement I prepared as part of a 1967
Report by the Civil Rights Commission,” she said.

Ms. Freemen had been a member of the Commission from 1964 to
1979. She lent us her U.S. Printing Office copy of the report, which had been
prepared at the request of President Lyndon B. Johnson.

The topic was “Racial Isolation in the Public
Schools.” In her supplementary statement, Ms. Freeman observed:

The worsening crisis in our cities is essentially a human
crisis. This is a truth we tend to forget because the crisis is so often
expressed in abstractions –dwindling tax revenues, housing
trends, unemployment rates, statistics on air pollution, or crime and
delinquency. Even in this report, which deals with a most fundamental aspect of
our current urban dilemma – the crisis in public education –we have had to describe what has been happening in terms of achievement
scores, graphs and figures. But it must never be forgotten that what we really
have been looking at is the brutal and unnecessary damage to human lives ….

[W]e are forced, rather, to ask the harder question, whether in
our present society …Negro children can prepare themselves
to participate effectively in society if they grow up and go to school in
isolation from the majority group. We must also ask whether we can cure the
disease of prejudice and prepare all children for life in a multicultural world
if white children grow up and go to school in isolation from Negroes….

If in the future the adults in our society who make decisions
about who gets a job, who lives down the block, or the essential worth of
another person are to be less likely to make these decisions on the basis of race
or class, the present cycle must be broken in classrooms which provide better
education than ever, and in which children of diverse backgrounds can come to
know one another.

We asked Ms. Freeman about advice she might have for younger
people engaged in social and community activism in St. Louis. Conversation
turned to a stylish and instructive way she responded to adversity she faced for
acting according to conscience:

In 1970, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission held hearings in St.
Louis County. Among the topics it considered was equal employment opportunity
in government contracting.

The commission questioned whether a certain St. Louis defense
contractor that had been awarded a major fighter jet contract had complied with
an executive order requiring that contractors first put a comprehensive
employment opportunity plan in place.

The St. Louis Globe-Democrat editorialized about the Commission’s inquiry, calling it a “Tea-Pot
Tempest.”Ms. Freeman begged to differ. She
responded with a letter to the editor.

“Without an acceptable Plan of Equal Employment Opportunity,”she wrote, “a contractor is not legally entitled
to hold a federal contract. Asking a contractor to produce such a plan is no
more unreasonable than asking that a certain standard of quality of the
finished product be maintained.”

Ms. Freeman was fired from her job as general counsel of the St.
Louis Housing Authority the day her letter appeared in the paper. She was made
to clean out her desk by the close of business that day.

Ms. Freeman confronted this adversity with confidence. She walked
into the old Stix Baer & Fuller department store. She asked to try on the
best full length mink coat they had. She purchased it on credit.

Ms. Freeman knew she would be returning to the private practice
of law, and the comfort of the beautiful coat combined with need to pay down
the account, she believed, would provide her with extra motivation to look and
move ahead.

***

We acknowledge being a little star struck in Ms. Freeman’s presence. We asked if she would inscribe our copy of her
memoir, "A Song of Faith and Hope." Thus came the third piece of advice we
received that day:

“Keep faith and hope alive,”she wrote.

Pictured: Frankie Muse Freeman from a video interview by the St.
Louis Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc.